Teaching Philosophy 35:2, June 2012

143

Philosophy Has Consequences!

Developing Metacognition and Active Learning
in the Ethics Classroom

PATRICK STOKES
Deakin University

Abstract: The importance of enchancing metacognition and encouraging

active learning in philosophy teaching has been increasingly recognised in
recent years. Yet traditional teaching methods have not always centralised
helping students to become reflectively and critically aware of the quality and
consistency of their own thinking. This is particularly relevant when teaching
moral philosophy, where apparently inconsistent intuitions and responses
are common. In this paper I discuss the theoretical basis of the relevance of
metacognition and active learning for teaching moral philosophy. Applying
recent discussions of metacognition, intuition conflicts and survey-based
teaching techniques, I then outline a strategy for encouraging metacognitive
awareness of tensions in students’ pretheoretical beliefs, and developing a
critical self-awareness of their development as moral thinkers.

1. Introduction
It’s a cliché that philosophers start out from Socrates’ injunction to
“know thyself.” Yet it’s worth asking whether much time is devoted
in philosophy classrooms to helping students know themselves, rather
than knowing about Plato, Kant, Heidegger, logic, metaphysics, and so
on. Philosophy assessment has typically been built around developing
students’ ability to analyse and engage with texts and arguments in a
critical way. Yet relatively less time is spent asking students to reflect
upon, let alone develop, the coherence of their overall set of beliefs
and opinions. We teach students to sniff out tensions and inconsisten-
cies in arguments and texts, but rarely ask them to apply these same
techniques to their own existing views and background assumptions.
This has a particular relevance to courses in ethics (defined here
to include moral theory, applied ethics, moral psychology etc.). Un-
© Teaching Philosophy, 2012. All rights reserved. 0145-5788 pp. 143–169
DOI: 10.5840/teachphil201235216
144 PATRICK STOKES

avoidably, students come to the ethics classroom with a set of largely

tacit and uninterrogated moral attitudes and assumptions. Everyday
moral experience involves a range of more or less reflexive and intui-
tive responses, and students can therefore be expected to find certain
statements of moral principles or reactions to a situation to be “obvi-
ously” right at first blush. Yet philosophy is rather good at dissolving
obviousness, and students will, we hope, soon come to understand the
uncertainty and complexity of moral theory. Inevitably, they will end
up becoming aware of the notorious cases where moral theory yields
“repugnant” conclusions—that is, cases where our moral emotions or
intuitions clash with the results of theorising, which generally make
us suspicious of the theory itself. If a theory, when carefully followed
through, can yield a conclusion that counterintuitive, something must
have gone badly wrong with the theory.
But how do I know that the problem is with the theory? How do I
know that the set of attitudes, beliefs and dispositions to respond in
certain ways that I use to judge these theories aren’t themselves ir-
rational, malformed or unjustified? It’s that sort of self-interrogation
that traditional philosophy teaching methods don’t always try to
develop in a systematic or self-conscious way. An invalid piece of
formal reasoning or a glaring exegetical error may be easy enough to
spot and fix; indeed, using techniques of “peer instruction” philosophy
students can actually correct many straightforward errors and misun-
derstandings themselves. 1 There is, however, a further task that needs
to be addressed: developing cognitive self-awareness, a reflective and
critical awareness of what and how one thinks, or what’s known in the
psychology and education literature as metacognition.
This task has an important temporal dimension as well. We can
use standard assessment tools to determine to what extent a student’s
familiarity with the taught material has developed and improved, and
we may also be able to gauge changes in their critical reasoning skills
provided the course of study is long enough and students are assessed
often enough. But if students are being exposed to theories that chal-
lenge their existing beliefs, what about tracking how these beliefs
change across the module?
Bringing critical attention to bear on one’s own beliefs and attitudes,
rather than simply a set of texts or arguments, connects with another
lauded (if rarely well-defined) pedagogical goal: the achievement of
active learning. In particular, the dimension of active learning in which
the content of the curriculum is somehow brought into the student’s life
and self-conception would be well-served by a teaching methodology
that enhances this sort of self-awareness.
In what follows, I offer a brief discussion of the theoretical basis of
the relevance of metacognition and active learning for ethics classes.
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 145

Applying the work of Crooks, Ribeiro and Aikin, Immerwahr, and

Nadelhoffer and Nahmias, I then outline a technique for encourag-
ing metacognitive awareness of tensions in students’ pretheoretical
beliefs, and developing a critical self-awareness of their development
as moral thinkers.

2. The Role of Metacognition and Active Learning

in the Ethics Classroom
Since the category of “metacognition” was first proposed, 2 its impor-
tance in learning has been increasingly recognised, with higher levels
of cognitive self-awareness by learners cited as a key predictor of
educational success.3 While metacognition, like many terms in the edu-
cational literature, is often used in a variety of ways and ranges over a
wide range of phenomena, in general it is understood within psychology
to refer, minimally, to the awareness of the psychological processes
involved in perception, memory, thinking and learning. 4 “Awareness”
might suggest passive receptivity, but most accounts of metacognition
emphasise its active character: not merely the perceiving of, but the
“monitoring and control of cognitive processes”5 or “the ability to think
about thinking, to be consciously aware of oneself as a problem solver,
and to monitor and control one’s mental processing.” 6 The concept of
cognitive self-regulation is inherent in metacognition, though there is
disagreement as to whether this is a subordinate component of meta-
cognition or a superordinate concept. 7 Hence, metacognition involves
the ability “to predict results of one’s own problem-solving actions,
to check the results of one’s own actions (Did it work?), to monitor
one’s progress toward a solution (How am I doing?), and to test how
reasonable one’s actions and solutions are against the larger reality
(Does this make sense?)” 8 Fisher, 9 citing Brown et al. 10 and Adey and
Shayer, 11 points to a distinction between metacognition as knowing
what one is thinking (and even being able to experiment with what one
is thinking) and actively seeking to go beyond one’s present cognitive
and rational repertoire. So in addition to its cognitive and regulative
dimensions there is a certain aspirational element to metacognition
as well: in seeking to monitor and control my rational activity, I am
implicitly or explicitly trying to think better, to hold my thinking up
to a standard whose validity I acknowledge, but which I am aware I
do not yet, or not consistently, reach. In discussing aspiration in the
context of moral thought, Robert Kane approvingly cites 12 Whitehead’s
description of philosophy as concerned with “the self-correction by
consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity”13—the desire of
the thinker to see the world as it is more clearly, by removing obstacles
within their own cognitive constitution.
146 PATRICK STOKES

While the desire to be rid of “excess subjectivity” would strike

many of us as itself highly suspect, Whitehead’s formula clearly has
something to it. Intuitively, it seems that such metacognitive aware-
ness should be important to the development of philosophy students,
both as learners and in a more particular sense as philosophers, or,
more broadly, as reasoners. Metacognition is essential to cultivating a
range of executive virtues in one’s thinking: caution, awareness of and
compensation for biases, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and
so on. In addition, metacognition can be seen as a means of improving
a thinker’s doxological “hygiene,” the internal consistency of her be-
liefs, opinions, and attitudes. To the extent that contradictions in one’s
beliefs or a tendency to hold uncritical assumptions are impediments
to effective reasoning, becoming aware of such factors would in turn
be extremely helpful in attempting to correct for these.
The importance of metacognitive skills for teaching philosophy
has only been discussed relatively recently, 14 but there would seem to
be a clear link between philosophy’s rough understanding of itself as,
in one of its dimensions, “thinking about thinking,” and the standard
psychological/educational understanding of metacognition. Indeed,
as Possin notes, some writers regard critical thinking as just being
metacognition, 15 an equation that is here meant to be deflationary of
critical thinking. Nonetheless, Concepción claims that the reflective,
self-assessment aspects of metacognition-enhancing learning are largely
unfamiliar to philosophy teachers.16 Crooks sees the relatively haphaz-
ard ability of traditional philosophy teaching methods to enhance meta-
cognition as an impediment to students developing their “inner critic:”
“while training and practice in interpersonal argumentation increases
students’ overall argumentation skills, it is not particularly effective in
helping students to develop the practice of engaging dialogically with
their own beliefs.” 17 Students, taught to test their ideas by engaging
with objections put forward by other people (and offering their own
objections to others), certainly learn how to argue interpersonally, but
beyond what they receive in formal feedback on assessment exercises
they have little impetus to argue intramentally—to argue with them-
selves and thereby question and improve their habits of thoughts.
To counter this, Crooks recommends asking students to write a series
of reflective pieces in order to prompt metacognition about their exist-
ing beliefs and habits of mind. Even in the relatively dry context of an
epistemology class, Crooks reports that students commonly identified
within themselves a strong and troubling reluctance to reconsider their
standing beliefs. In the context of an ethics class, such reluctance is
likely to be greatly magnified; moral beliefs and intuitions run very
deep, psychologically speaking, and so confirmation bias is likely to
be very powerful. We care about our moral beliefs in a peculiarly
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 147

strong way; this is particularly true, as Ribeiro and Aikin show, where
students’ stated moral beliefs are strongly tied (or they believe them to
be so) to their religious commitments.18 Tacit self-conception probably
plays a role here too: most of us could cope with finding out we aren’t
terribly good epistemologists, but no-one wants to think of themselves
as a morally deficient (or at least confused) person. Uncovering an
inconsistency in a student’s stated set of moral beliefs has the potential
to provoke a particularly uncomfortable form of cognitive dissonance,
one that any teaching strategy focussed on bringing these inconsisten-
cies to salience will need to handle carefully.
Insofar as metacognition helps students to become “active par-
ticipants in their own performance rather than passive recipients of
instruction and imposed experience,” 19 it is closely allied to the goal
of promoting active learning—one of Chickering and Gamson’s now-
canonical elements of good practice in undergraduate education. 20 As
with many terms used in the educational literature, “active learning”
is invoked far more often than it is defined, and is often used in a
variety of senses. Some writers assert that all learning is active to
at least some degree, 21 so the term is partly relative. Chickering and
Gamson understand active learning to mean a form of learning that
goes beyond passive information absorption and retention and allows
students to “talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it
to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make
what they learn part of themselves.” 22
That last phrase, though somewhat vague, coheres well with how
philosophical learning has classically been understood. Active Learning
is closely tied to pedagogical constructivism—yet another term with
a plurality of meanings, 23 but broadly concerned with the idea that
learning involves “continuous building and amending of structures in
the mind that ‘hold’ knowledge” and thus an active construction of
knowledge that simultaneously transforms the individual. 24 Students
actively construct knowledge for themselves, re-arranging their own
structures of understanding in the process, rather than passively receiv-
ing knowledge like water poured into an (unchanging) empty vessel.
Such a constructivist picture of learning harmonises with at least some
of the ways in which philosophy is traditionally taught, with students
taught to work through (in effect, to “reconstruct”) arguments and
texts themselves. One cannot simply regurgitate philosophical “facts,”
but must instead demonstrate that one has understood the argument
and can critique it as an interlocutor; in terms of Biggs’s SOLO tax-
onomy, 25 only developing extended abstract understanding will count
as genuinely acquiring philosophical knowledge in the strict sense.
Indeed critiques of the passive “empty vessel” model of learning go
back to Plato himself, who has Socrates ironically consider how “fine”
148 PATRICK STOKES

it would be “if wisdom were a sort of thing that could flow out of the
one of us who is fuller into him who is emptier, by our mere contact
with each other” (Symposium 175d). Wisdom (sophia) just isn’t like
that: it cannot be transferred passively into the learner’s head, but must
be actively worked through and appropriated. Moreover, as Brendan
Larvor has argued, students in philosophy (and mathematics) need to
come at philosophical problems with a degree of visceral engagement
if they’re to understand the arguments properly. 26 They cannot simply
go through the motions or recite by rote, for it’s only when they have
felt the force of an argument, the way an entailment drags the thinker
along or a conclusion imposes itself upon them, that they have truly
understood the argument at all. Hence, active learning of this sort is
essential to any successful philosophy education.

3. A Strategy for Enhancing Ethical Metacognition

As discussed above, metacognition in a philosophy context will involve
both an awareness of one’s “habits of thought” and “doxological hy-
giene,” and an aspiration to improve these in light of an (implicitly)
recognised standard. Such a standard might be hard to spell out in
full, but in general, we would want to hold a set of beliefs that was
both internally coherent and ultimately defensible. We want to be able
to give good reasons for the things we believe, and we want those
beliefs not to be contradicted by our other beliefs. When dealing with
pretheoretical moral beliefs, then, we need to determine what we believe
with a critical eye, identifying beliefs that are either undefended or in
contradiction with other beliefs. Whether moral beliefs are defensible
or not will ultimately, in the context of an ethics classroom, depend on
whether good theoretical reasons can be given to support those beliefs:
you say it’s okay to tell a lie to save your friend from an assailant,
but what moral framework can you use to support that? Which of the
existing ethical theories supports your belief? Do deficiencies in those
theories in turn weaken your belief, causing you to revise or repudiate
your original intuitive response?
Yet it’s that last question that seems likely to cause problems. It’s
all too easy, as we know, to divorce moral theory from moral practice
and moral experience, especially in light of the particular way in which
we care about our moral beliefs discussed above. Given the visceral
character of immediate moral intuitions, it may seem to students that
merely theoretical matters can’t touch the validity of their intuitive
responses. If something just seems self-obviously morally right or
wrong, for instance, why should I conclude that my visceral response
is incorrect on the basis of abstract, highly contested moral theories
I’ve only just heard about? Here again, metacognition and active
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 149

learning are closely interconnected: if we want students to assess and

improve the validity of their own views, we need to bring the force of
moral arguments into their lives by getting them to see the implica-
tions of theory for their own beliefs. Yet how do we start students on
this process if simply showing them that their intuitive responses are
inconsistent with theory might not “grip” them in the necessary way?
How do we get students to care about how their moral intuitions stand
in relation to moral theory? One powerful way of doing this, I suggest,
is by demonstrating a clash between two things students already care
about: their existing moral intuitions. If we can point out inconsistency
between intuitive responses, rather than between intuitive responses
and theoretical models, we can provoke reflection on the consistency
and validity of one’s own beliefs in a more compelling way. But how,
in practical terms, do we achieve this?
Ribeiro and Aikin develop a technique for helping students identify
inconsistency in their moral views (in their case, incompatibilities
between their moral and religious views, but the point also works for
clashes between moral beliefs, or between a stated belief in a moral
principle and an intuitive moral response to a given situation) that
tries to overcome these sort of biases using what, they admit, is a sort
of “gotcha pedagogy.” 27 In their system, which is used in a classroom
where most students identify their Judeo-Christian religious commit-
ments as underpinning their moral beliefs, students are asked to evaluate
a set of morally troubling statements purportedly taken from the sacred
texts of various non-Judeo-Christian religions. When the students all
react negatively to these scriptural endorsements of practices such as
child sacrifice and slavery, the teacher reveals that all the statements
are, in fact, actually sourced from the Old and New Testaments. While
there are clear disadvantages to a teaching method that “entraps”
students in contradictions like this, it also does help make these in-
consistencies manifest in a way that the student cannot ignore. Such
a method would need to be used with caution: approaching the task
with a collegial rather than confrontational manner would help take
some of the sting out of the “gotcha” moment. Students may feel that
their conflicting or apparently inconsistent intuitions are evidence of
personal or intellectual inadequacy, 28 so it is important, as Larvor puts
it, to explain to them that intuitional confusion is where philosophy
gets going, to “Take time to respect and develop the intuitions that
students already have” and to explain that “examining naive intuitions
is a standard part of what philosophers do,” and so in examining their
own intuitions they are in fact doing philosophy. 29 (In discussing the
technique described below with students, for instance, I make a point
of highlighting instances where I, too, have apparently inconsistent
beliefs and simply don’t know—yet—how to resolve them, thereby
150 PATRICK STOKES

letting students know that even professional philosophers can find

themselves in the grip of the same sort of perplexity).
As noted above, challenging a student’s moral beliefs can be con-
fronting and is fraught with risk. This is especially a consideration with
a student cohort drawn from a diverse range of cultural and religious
backgrounds, where discussions of specific moral topics may be sensi-
tive, and which potentially contain students “who may understand some
or even many of their commitments to be ones about which further
reasoning is either immaterial or inappropriate.” 30 A strong negative
affective response may lead to a reflexive defence of one’s beliefs
without further inquiry, rather than an open-minded consideration of
where and how one might be wrong. Moreover, students may be less
inclined to answer questions in a classroom setting where they believe
their moral beliefs to be open to critique and criticism from their peers.
They may also have concerns that a teacher who knows, and disagrees
with, their moral beliefs may become biased against them.
All of this suggests the need for a non-confrontational, and prefer-
ably non-public and anonymous,31 means of getting students to confront
potential inconsistencies in their moral beliefs. One way of doing this is
via the use of electronic voting systems (EVS), an increasingly popular
means of gaining instant feedback from students in a classroom set-
ting.32 As Immerwahr notes, EVS can be a useful tool in the philosophy
classroom for three primary reasons: it helps to generate and maintain
student attention; it promotes a sense of emotional engagement among
students; and it helps students become aware of the effect of exposure
to philosophical argument on their own views. 33 All three elements
are important from the perspective of promoting active learning and
metacognition. However it’s the third suggestion—that EVS can be
used to track the development of students’ views across time—that
is particularly relevant here. Immerwahr shows that EVS can be used
to demonstrate to students that their views do not emerge unchanged
from their encounter with philosophical argument.
One potential weakness of EVS, however, is that EVS systems do
not always allow for the analysis and retention of two-level data. In
trying to identify clashes between, say, a student’s stated beliefs and
their intuitive responses to a moral dilemma scenario, it is important
that responses to two separate questions can be compared. In trying
to measure changes to students’ views across time it is also important
that earlier and later data can be compared. While some EVS systems
may be able to perform this task, another viable alternative is to use
an online survey platform to survey students on their views.
In an excellent discussion of ways to incorporate the techniques of
the emerging field of experimental philosophy into teaching, Nadel-
hoffer and Nahmias note that using surveys built around thought
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 151

experiments to probe student’s intuitions regarding questions of free

will and responsibility “not only generated some interesting results,
but it also worked remarkably well to get students to engage with the
material. . . . A tool that we originally introduced into our classrooms
for research purposes turned out to be a valuable pedagogical tool as
well.”34 They also note that written surveys give students a better chance
of fully understanding the question, and also send the message that
students’ opinions are important. They also touch briefly on the capac-
ity to track changes in students’ opinions during the semester. Here
I want to suggest an additional benefit to the methodology pioneered
by Nadelhoffer and Nahmias: it can be used, when combined with the
sort of contradiction-awareness-raising techniques discussed above, to
promote—indeed, to provoke—metacognising in ethics students. And
by shifting from paper-based to online survey techniques, we can deal
with some of the sensitivities discussed above, as well as having data
in a quickly accessible electronic format.
Constructing such a survey is not difficult; one can look at exist-
ing online ethical consistency surveys, such as that offered by www.
philosophyexperiments.com, to get an idea of what such a survey
might include. For my second-year ethics module, I constructed a
fairly simple survey using the Bristol Online Surveys platform. Prior
to the start of semester, all students enrolled in the module were sent
an email explaining the rationale for the survey (in outline) and provid-
ing a URL. It was made clear to students that their participation in the
survey was optional and anonymous. At the start of the survey, each
student was asked to nominate a screen name, which they would use
again on future surveys. Students were then presented with a series of
questions, arranged in three sections.
Section One asked students to state whether they agreed or disagreed
(simple yes/no multiple choice) with a series of normative ethical
statements e.g., “It is never morally permissible to kill an innocent
person,” “It is sometimes morally permissible to torture someone,” etc.
Section Two presented a series of metaethical propositions (e.g., “In
any situation, the right thing to do is that action which will produce
the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” “Morality is simply a
matter of convention” etc.) and asked students to state how strongly
they agreed or disagreed on a five-item Likert scale.
Section Three presented a series of fairly standard moral dilemma
cases. Students were asked in each case which of two available op-
tions they would choose as the morally right course of action in that
scenario. (These scenarios are outlined below).
At the conclusion of the survey, students were presented with some
text explaining where potential disagreements between the theoretical
statements in Section One and responses to the moral dilemma cases
152 PATRICK STOKES

presented in Section Three might be found. Students were also asked

to print out their responses for future reference.
Students were surveyed twice more during the course of the semes-
ter, using the same survey structure. The third survey repeated the ques-
tions from the first survey, and also included questions about whether
and in what ways students felt their views had changed over time.

4. Results
While the number of results was too small to provide statistically
significant data, the survey results revealed a number of apparent ten-
sions between students’ pretheoretical views which proved useful for
classroom discussion.
In the well-worn Trolley Problem, 35 faced with the choice of flick-
ing a switch to divert a runaway train to save five innocent people
but killing one innocent person, 72% of respondents said they would
flick the switch. But where the mechanism for stopping the train was
changed from flicking a switch to throwing an innocent person off a
bridge into the path of the oncoming train, the same percentage would
not take this option. In fact 38% of those who said they would flick
the switch would not throw the innocent person off the bridge. When
the same question was asked again at the end of the semester, 75%
would flick the switch, while 67% would throw the innocent person
off the bridge. This time, 56% of those who would flick the switch
would not throw the innocent person off the bridge.
Of those who agreed that “It is never morally permissible to kill
an innocent person,” 71% would nonetheless throw the switch (killing
one innocent person to save five), while 29% said they would throw
one person off the bridge in order to save five other people. When the
survey was repeated at the end of the module, that had risen to 75%
and 25% respectively (effectively unchanged).
While 72% of respondents would not throw an innocent person off
the bridge, if the scenario is changed such that the person they were
throwing off was the saboteur responsible for the runaway train (in a
deliberate effort to murder the five innocent people on the track up
ahead), 78% of respondents, including 69% of those who refused to
throw the innocent person off the bridge, would throw the saboteur off
the bridge. Interestingly, 70% of those who disagreed with the state-
ment “it is sometimes morally permissible to torture someone” would
throw the saboteur off the bridge—even though the moral structure of
the situation seems analogous to that of torturing someone in a “tick-
ing bomb” scenario. Similar results were returned at the end of the
semester: 83% would throw the saboteur off the bridge, including 75%
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 153

who would refuse to throw an innocent person off the bridge and 60%
who disagreed that torture is sometimes permissible.
In Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Violinist Dilemma 36—where you have
been involuntarily hooked up to a world-famous violinist for several
months, who will die if you unhook yourself—56% said they would
remain hooked up, including 57% of those who agreed with the state-
ment “No-one else is entitled to exercise control over my body.” Inter-
estingly, these responses dropped to 42% and 38% when the survey was
repeated. Students did not generally remember their responses to the
first time they answered this question, suggesting a need for a better
method for helping students compare their earlier and later answers
than was available here.
The second survey presented a separate set of dilemmas that were
not repeated in the third survey. Students were presented with a case
of two women: the first woman poisons her husband, while the second
intends to poison her husband, but before she can do so, he accidentally
poisons himself. She has the antidote, but chooses not to give it to
him.37 Respondents overwhelmingly (87%) agreed the second woman’s
actions were as bad as the first, and a further 7% felt they were actu-
ally worse. Of 67% of students who agreed with the statement “If I
have it in my power to help someone and refuse to do so, I bear moral
responsibility for their suffering,” 10% still felt that the second woman’s
action was not as bad (a further 10% felt it was worse and 80% felt it
was as bad). However, of the 33% who disagreed with the statement,
100% said the second woman’s refusal to help was just as bad as the
first woman’s active murder. Of those who felt each action was just as
bad, 67% agreed either slightly or strongly with the statement “There
is an important moral difference between making something happen
through your own actions, and simply allowing it to happen.” These
results made it possible to discuss whether it was intuitions about the
nature of action and omission, or about the nature of duties to help
others, that might have been at work in these responses.
When presented with the options of preventing a lifeboat from
sinking by throwing half its passengers overboard, 38 73% of respon-
dents said they would do so, while 27% would not. In the same sur-
vey, 80% of students had agreed with the statement “In a situation of
moral dilemma, you should choose the course of action with the least
bad consequences.” Yet 25% of those who agreed with this statement
would still refuse to throw anyone overboard, thus allowing twice the
number of people to die.
Conversely, 67% of those who rejected the consequentialist premise
would nevertheless throw innocent people overboard. However, when
the situation is changed such that we have to choose one of two innocent
people to kill in this scenario—one a pioneering medical researcher on
154 PATRICK STOKES

the verge of a major breakthrough, the other a disabled pensioner—a

plurality (42%) of those who agreed with the consequentialist premise
would nonetheless toss a coin to decide rather than choosing a specific
person. Among those who disagreed, 67% would also choose to toss
a coin.
In a scenario where there are only three parachutes for four people
on a rapidly falling airplane,39 53% would draw straws to see who gets
the parachute, while 40% would “Choose the person whose death will
create the least sadness and give the parachutes to the other three”
and 7% would refuse to choose so that no-one gets the parachute.
Again, of those who agreed with the premise “In a situation of moral
dilemma, you should choose the course of action with the least bad
consequences,” 50% would still draw straws. Among those who rejected
it, 67% would choose to draw straws, and (as one might expect) none
would choose to sacrifice the person whose death would cause the least
sadness. Counterintuitively, those who agreed that “Every human life is
equally valuable” were actually more likely (44%) than those who dis-
agreed to take the consequentialist option (of whom 33% would do so).
Students were asked whether they believed their views had changed
across the course of the semester, and in what ways. The results sug-
gested that students believed themselves to have become somewhat
more consistent in their moral beliefs (whether this was in fact the case
or not—the response might indicate awareness of the issue rather than
a genuine assessment of their own consistency). Some also reported a
shift in their thinking that could not be described as simply becoming
more utilitarian or more deontological; this may be a function of stu-
dents’ developing awareness of the problems raised by both positions.

5. Using The Results in the Classroom

As noted above, these small pool of results obtained in this pilot pro-
gram do not tell us anything useful from the perspective of empirical
research into moral cognition—nor, being a pedagogical rather than
a research tool, were they ever intended to do so. However they do
offer some useful classroom resources and opportunities for further
self-reflection and self-critique. In this final section I will discuss how
these resources and opportunities were used, and avenues for potential
development of this technique.

i. Using Contradictions
The survey uncovered a series of apparent conflicts of intuition. By
sharpening these and bringing them into view, these can be used in
an exploratory way in the classroom, asking students to identify the
features of the situation that might appear to license these intuitive
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 155

responses—and whether these features are in fact morally relevant

or not. In discussion, students were asked to articulate where the
contradictions in the data lay and what they might suggest about the
factors that seemed important to respondents. In this way, the data
results helped to shape the ensuing discussions and got students talk-
ing about how these conflicts arise and how they might potentially be
resolved. They thus provided a conversational “springboard” and a way
of structuring the discussion around conflicts that related very directly
to the students’ own views.
When presented with these apparent contradictions in the first and
second surveys, students expressed a degree of surprise. But once a
student has been lead to identify tensions or contradictions in their be-
liefs, how are they to proceed? Ribeiro and Aikin develop a taxonomy
of possible approaches open to the student:
Acceptance Responses:
a) resolving the inconsistency by eliminating one of the beliefs;
b) resolving the inconsistency by suspending judgment about each member
of the set of inconsistent beliefs;
c) boldly embracing the inconsistency
Denial Responses:
a) deny that the appearance of inconsistency is genuine and seek to clarify
how the beliefs in question are, despite initial appearances, consistent.40
As was explained to the students in this exercise, denial responses
are actually a viable option to many of the apparent contradictions
here. It may be that the differences between the cases that students are
responding to are morally significant; for instance, the putative differ-
ence between killing and allowing to die might be doing a lot of the
intuitive work in the trolley problem. But students would then need to
identify what the prima facie morally relevant features of the situation
are, and then reflect on whether it really is rationally defensible to
assign moral weight to those features. Using the contradictions identi-
fied via online surveys will therefore require classroom or assessment
tasks that are structured so as to facilitate both steps in this process:
identifying what the intuitions appear to be tracking, and whether what
they track is, in fact, morally significant.

ii. Self-Review and Self-Critique

The survey data also provides an opportunity for students to review
their own responses and comment critically upon these, noting and
critiquing changes in their thinking. For reasons outlined above, this is
perhaps better tackled through an assessment task rather than in open
classroom discussion.
156 PATRICK STOKES

Online ethics surveys can be a powerful way of asking students

to consider the clarity and coherence of their own views. However to
be effective, they require a reliable method for students to track their
own responses. The survey series described here required students to
keep records of their own earlier responses, which was not particularly
effective (especially as the survey was optional in this case—a man-
datory assessment task would likely yield better results). An online
survey platform that allows students to create individual accounts and
view their earlier responses would be a very powerful tool for assisting
students in reflecting on their development. Importantly, this would
also allow students to check their perception of how their views have
changed against their actual data—an important step in terms of the
control and aspirational dimensions of metacognition.
Despite believing that their views had changed (75% of Survey 3
respondents), the results showed relatively little evidence that students’
views did change. It may be, however, that if students were set a writ-
ing task built around the contradictions identified in the surveys, they
might feel more compulsion to revise their views (though it is equally
important that students not feel they have to change their views, or
that they have somehow failed if their views have remained the same
throughout the semester). However, the deeply ingrained and often
incorrigible nature of many moral intuitions cannot be denied, and
expecting students to become significantly more internally consistent in
their views in a single semester might be unrealistic. Even so, making
students aware of the depth of the problem and their own problematic
relationship to it may be enough of a metacognitive payoff to make
the exercise worthwhile.
One key task for future use of this teaching technique would be
to compare overall performance in assessment from modules where
students participate in these surveys against modules without a survey
component. The optional nature of this pilot project, combined with the
sheer volume of data that would be necessary for such a comparison
to be informative, meant this was not possible this time around, but
ultimately this would provide a clearer sense of the efficacy of this
teaching method.

iii. Self-Situation and Active Learning

The data provides an opportunity for students to reflect on how they
themselves stand in relation to the material they have covered—in
effect, forcing themselves to consider whether they are e.g., conse-
quentialist, deontologist, or something else. Students seem to respond
positively to being asked to situate their own views in relation to the
main schools of thought, not least, I suspect, because this reinforces
their sense of themselves as philosophers rather than as “passive”
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 157

learners. (Building on something some of my lecturers did when I was

an undergraduate, I make sure to refer to my students as philosophers,
and not just as students, at least once during the course of the term).
Asking students to locate their own views against the map of avail-
able metaethical positions promotes precisely the sort of active learning
discussed above: bringing the material studied into the student’s life
by bringing their own relation to the texts and arguments into explicit
focus. Instead of simply asking a student to explain and evaluate an
argument—much as one would strip down a piece of machinery and
evaluate its performance—students are here asked where they stand
in relation to the material being taught. As noted, this must be done
with a degree of care: this technique asks students to critically assess
themselves as moral beings, and as such can go to the core of their
conception of themselves as “good people.” But for that very reason,
it holds prospects for bringing home to students that philosophy is,
indeed, serious business, that the “we” in the ethical question “how are
we to live?” includes the student herself, and that grappling with the
sort of questions moral philosophy is concerned with can, and should,
have consequences.
158 PATRICK STOKES

Appendix: Survey Questions and Results

Question Response First Second Third
Survey Survey Survey
It is sometimes morally per- Agree 8 44.4% 7 58.3%
missible to torture someone.
Disagree 10 55.6% 5 41.7%
We have a moral duty to Agree 16 88.9% 11 91.7%
help strangers in distress.
Disagree 2 11.1% 1 8.3%
No-one else is entitled to ex- Agree 14 77.8% 8 66.7%
ercise control over my body.
Disagree 4 22.2% 4 33.3%
It is never morally per- Agree 14 77.8% 8 66.7%
missable to kill an innocent
person. Disagree 4 22.2% 4 33.3%
It is sometimes morally Agree 17 94.4% 8 66.7%
permissable to lie.
Disagree 1 5.6% 4 33.3%
In a situation of moral Agree 12 80.0%
dilemma, you should choose
the course of action with the Disagree 3 20.0%
least bad consequences.
No-one has the right to take Agree 15 100%
an innocent person’s life
against their will. Disagree 0 0.0%
If I have it in my power to Agree 10 66.7%
help someone and refuse to
do so, I bear moral responsi- Disagree 5 33.3%
bility for their suffering.
Every human life is equally Agree 9 60.0%
valuable.
Disagree 6 40.0%
In deciding which of two Agree 1 6.7%
people should get something
(that can’t be split between Disagree 14 93.3%
them), flipping a coin is
always the fairest way.
Some actions are always Strongly 1 5.6% 1 6.7% 1 8.3%
morally impermissible. Disagree
Slightly 3 16.7% 1 6.7% 2 16.7%
Disagree
Neither Agree 3 16.7% 4 26.7% 1 8.3%
nor Disagree
Slightly Agree 7 38.9% 4 26.7% 4 33.3%
Strongly 4 22.2% 5 33.3% 4 33.3%
Agree
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 159

There is an important moral Strongly 1 5.6% 1 6.7% 2 16.7%

difference between making Disagree
something happen through
your own actions, and sim- Slightly 5 27.8% 1 6.7% 0 0.0%
ply allowing it to happen. Disagree
Neither Agree 2 11.1% 3 20.0% 3 25.0%
nor Disagree
Slightly Agree 6 33.3% 5 33.3% 5 41.7%
Strongly 4 22.2% 5 33.3% 2 16.7%
Agree
In any situation, the right Strongly 4 22.2% 3 20.0% 2 16.7%
thing to do is that action Disagree
which, as far as you can
tell, will create the greatest Slightly 3 16.7% 4 26.7% 2 16.7%
happiness for the greatest Disagree
number of people. Neither Agree 3 16.7% 3 20.0% 5 41.7%
nor Disagree
Slightly Agree 8 44.4% 3 20.0% 3 25.0%
Strongly 0 0.0% 2 13.3% 0 0.0%
Agree
The moral value of an Strongly 1 5.6% 2 13.3% 1 8.3%
action depends not on its Disagree
consequences, but on the
intention of the person who Slightly 3 16.7% 2 13.3% 0 0.0%
does the action. Disagree
Neither Agree 3 16.7% 0 0.0% 3 25.0%
nor Disagree
Slightly Agree 8 44.4% 8 53.3% 5 41.7%
Strongly 3 16.7% 3 20.0% 3 25.0%
Agree
Morality is purely a matter Strongly 1 5.6% 2 13.3% 2 16.7%
of convention; “right” and Disagree
“wrong,” “good” and “bad”
are simply words we use, Slightly 6 33.3% 3 20.0% 3 25.0%
not real or objective proper- Disagree
ties of things, actions or Neither Agree 3 16.7% 4 26.7% 2 16.7%
events nor Disagree
Slightly Agree 7 38.9% 2 13.3% 4 33.3%
Strongly 1 5.6% 4 26.7% 1 8.3%
Agree
160 PATRICK STOKES

The brakes on an empty Don’t flick 5 27.8% 3 25.0%

train have failed, and it is the switch
now hurtling out of control (5 dead)
down the track. Up ahead,
there are five people stuck
on the track; there is no way
they can get off the track
before the train gets there,
so if the train keeps going
in its current direction, it
will certainly kill those five Flick 13 72.2% 9 75.0%
people. You’re standing next the switch
to a switch that, if you flick (1 dead)
it, will divert the train onto
a siding and out of the path
of the five people on the
track. Unfortunately, there is
another person stuck on that
siding, who won’t be able
to get off the track in time
to avoid the train; so if you
flick the switch the five peo-
ple on the main track will
survive, but the one person
on the siding will certainly
die.Should you flick the
switch and divert the train
(1 dead) or allow the train to
keep going (5 dead)?
Has your answer to this Yes 2 16.7%
question changed since last
time you were asked it? No 6 50.0%
Don’t 4 33.3%
Remember
In what way do you think More 1 50.0%
your answer has changed? utiltarian than
previously
More deonto- 1 50.0%
logical than
previously
Neither more 0 0.0%
utiltarian
nor more
deontological
Not sure 0 0.0%
Other (please 0 0
specify):
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 161

The same problem as Do not throw 13 72.2% 8 66.7%

before: a train is hurtling the fat man
down the track toward five off the bridge
people, who are stuck on (5 dead)
the track and will certainly
be killed if the train cannot Throw the fat 5 27.8% 4 33.3%
be stopped or diverted. This man off the
time, though, there’s no bridge
switch and no siding. You’re (1 dead)
standing on top of a bridge
waiting for the train to pass
beneath. You realise that
if you just had some sort
of heavy object, you could
drop it onto the tracks and
stop the train, thus saving
the five people up ahead.
You look around for a heavy
object. Unfortunately, the
only large object anywhere
to be seen is a fat man who
is standing next to you. His
body is about the right size
and shape, so if you pushed
him off the bridge and
onto the tracks, you would
definitely stop the train and
save the five people—but
of course the fat man (who
hasn’t done anything wrong)
would be killed. What do
you do?
Has your answer to this Yes 1 8.3%
question changed since last
time you were asked it? No 8 66.7%
Don’t 3 25.0%
Remember
In what way do you think More 0 0.0%
your answer has changed? utiltarian than
previously
More deonto- 1 100%
logical than
previously
Neither more 0 0.0%
utiltarian
nor more
deontological
Not sure 0 0.0%
Other (please 0 0.0%
specify):
162 PATRICK STOKES

The same situation as Do not throw 4 22.2% 2 16.7%

before. But just as you’re the fat man
weighing up whether to off the bridge
throw the fat man off the (5 dead)
bridge, he starts laughing
maniacally: “Mwah-ha- Throw the 14 77.8% 10 83.3%
ha! My plan to sabotage fat man off
the brakes and kill the the bridge
five people trapped on the (1 dead)
tracks is working perfectly!”
Because of other evidence
you’ve seen, you know for
sure that the fat man is
telling the truth: he’s the
saboteur! So what do you do
now: do you throw the fat
man off the bridge and save
his five potential victims, or
do you spare his life and let
the train continue?
Has your answer to this Yes 0 0.0%
question changed since last
time you were asked it? No 7 58.3%
Don’t 5 41.7%
Remember
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 163

A world-famous violinist Remain 10 55.6% 5 41.7%

has become gravely ill and hooked up for
has fallen into a coma. The twelve months
Society of Music Lovers has (the violinist
learned that there is only lives)
one way to save her life:
she must be hooked up to Unhook 8 44.4% 7 58.3%
a person with the right sort yourself (the
of physiology for twelve violinist dies)
months. Unfortunately, the
right sort of physiology is
extremely rare. The Soci-
ety’s members have been
trawling through medical
records to find a suitable
person who has that sort
of physiology. It turns out
there’s only one person
in the whole world with
the sort of physiology that
would allow them to save
the Violinist: you. So that
very night, the music lovers
break into your house while
you are asleep and hook
the violinist up to you. (Re-
member that the violinist is
unconscious and has no idea
about what the music lovers
are doing). You wake up to
find yourself hooked up to
the violinist. The music lov-
ers can’t physically stop you
from unhooking yourself,
but they explain that unless
you stay hooked up like this
for the next twelve months,
the violinist will definitely
die. You’re wondering what
to do: the violinist is an
innocent person, and you
hold her life in your hands,
but you are also being asked
to surrender control of your
body for a year in order to
save the life of someone
you don’t know and whose
present condition is in no
way your fault. What do you
decide to do?
Has your answer to this Yes 1 8.3%
question changed since last
time you were asked it? No 3 25.0%
Don’t 8 66.7%
Remember
164 PATRICK STOKES

In what way do you think More 0 0.0%

your answer has changed? utiltarian than
previously
More deonto- 0 0.0%
logical than
previously
Neither more 0 0.0%
utiltarian
nor more
deontological
Not sure 1 100%
Other (please 0 0
specify):
Mary hates her husband (no Sally’s failure 13 86.7%
real reason, she just finds to help is
him annoying), and decides just as bad as
she wants him dead. To that Mary’s action
end, she puts poison in his
tea, thereby killing him. Sally’s failure 1 6.7%
Sally also hates her husband to help is
(again, not because of any- not as bad as
thing he’s done), and would Mary’s action
also like him dead. One day, Sally’s failure 1 6.7%
Sally’s husband accidentally to help is
puts poison in his own tea, worse than
thinking it’s sugar. Sally has Mary’s action
the antidote, but doesn’t give
it to him, and he dies. Is
Sally’s failure to act as bad
as Mary’s action?
You are a crew member on a Do not throw 4 26.7%
ship that has just sunk. You anyone over-
and 31 other survivors are board, allow-
huddled together in a life- ing it to sink
boat—in fact, the lifeboat is (32 dead)
so dangerously overcrowded
that it is certain to sink, Throw enough 11 73.3%
killing everyone on board. people over-
The only way to stop it from board to save
sinking is to throw half the the boat
people onboard overboard. (16 dead)
There are no volunteers to
sacrifice themselves, so the
only way to save anyone is
to forcibly throw some peo-
ple into the sea. You’re the
senior surviving crewmem-
ber, so the decision falls to
you—what do you do?
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 165

The passengers on the life- Choose the 6 40.0%

boat all agree that some peo- disability
ple will need to be thrown pensioner
overboard—and even if you
won’t do it, the other crew- Choose the 2 13.3%
men will. So it’s now certain medical
that 16 of the people on the researcher
boat will die. Selflessly, 15 Toss a coin 7 46.7%
brave passengers now agree
to sacrifice their lives and
throw themselves into the
water, drowning. Now we
just need to decide the last
person to go into the water.
It’s down to two people:
a pioneering medical re-
searcher who is on the verge
of a major breakthrough,
and someone who is unable
to work due to a serious
disability and is forced to
subsist on a pension. You
must choose one of these
two people to be thrown into
the water. Both seem to be
thoroughly nice people, nei-
ther have family, and neither
wants to die. What do you
choose to do?
You’re on a plane (a small Choose the 6 40.0%
one) when the engine stalls person whose
and it starts plummeting death will
toward the ground. There are create the
four of you on the plane, all least sadness
strangers to each other—and and give the
there’s only three para- parachutes to
chutes. One of you will have the other three
to stay on the plane and (1 dead)
die (or jump out and die).
Earlier in the flight you had Draw straws 8 53.3%
mentioned that you studied to see who
moral philosophy in college, doesn’t get the
so now the other three pas- parachute (1
sengers all agree to leave the dead)
decision up to you. What do Refuse to 1 6.7%
you do? choose, so
no one gets a
parachute
(4 dead)
On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = 1 0 0.0% 0 0.0%
least consistent, 5 = most
consistent), how consistent 2 3 20.0% 1 8.3%
do you think your answers
in Section One were with 3 8 53.3% 4 33.3%
your answers in the moral
dilemma cases? 4 4 26.7% 7 58.3%
5 0 0.0% 0 0.0%
166 PATRICK STOKES

Thinking back to the first Much less 1 6.7% 0 0.0%

time you did this survey, consistent
do you think your answers
were more consistent or less Slightly less 3 20.0% 0 0.0%
consistent this time? consistent
About the 5 33.3% 5 41.7%
same
Slightly more 4 26.7% 6 50.0%
consistent
Much more 2 13.3% 1 8.3%
consistent
Thinking back to the first Changed 5 41.7%
time you did this survey, a little
how much do you think your
answers have changed dur- Changed a lot 4 33.3%
ing the semester? No Change 2 16.7%
Not Sure 1 8.3%
Overall, in what ways do My views 3 25.0%
you think your views have have become
changed during the course of more
the module? deontologist
My views 1 8.3%
have become
more
utilitarian
My views 1 8.3%
have changed,
but I’m not
sure how
My views 5 41.7%
have shifted
toward another
moral position
(neither
utilitarian nor
deontologist)
My views 2 16.7%
haven’t
changed
On a scale of 1–5 (1 = “Not 1 0 0.0%
at all”, 5 = “Very high”),
how useful do you think this 2 0 0.0%
exercise has been in terms
of understanding your moral 3 1 8.3%
views?
4 4 33.3%
5 7 58.3%
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 167

Notes
This paper was made possible by a European Commission Marie Curie Intra-European
Fellowship at the University of Hertfordshire. My thanks to my students at UH for their
participation in this exercise and feedback, and to Brendan Larvor and Helen Barefoot
for helpful comments and suggestions.
1. Sam Butchart, Toby Handfield, and Greg Restall, “Using Peer Instruction to Teach
Philosophy, Logic and Critical Thinking,” Teaching Philosophy 32:1 (March 2009): 1–40.
2. By John H. Favell in “Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring,” American Psy-
chologist 34 (1979): 906–11.
3. See, e.g., Margaret C. Wang, Geneva D. Haertel, and Herbert J. Walberg, “What
Influences Learning? A Content Analysis of Review Literature,” Journal of Educational
Research 84:1 (October 1990): 30–43.
4. Lena Boström and Liv M. Lassen, “Unraveling Learning, Learning Styles, Learn-
ing Strategies and Meta-Cognition,” Education and Training 48:2/3 (2006): 178–89.
5. Lynne M. Reder and Christian D. Schunn, “Metacognition Does Not Imply Aware-
ness: Strategy Choice Is Governed by Implicit Learning and Memory,” in Implicit Memory
and Metacognition, ed. Lynne M. Reder (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1996), 45–78, 45.
6. John T. Bruer, Schools for Thought: A Science for Learning in the Classroom
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 67.
7. Marcel V. J. Veenman, Bernadette H. A. M. Van Hout-Wolters, and Peter Af-
flerbach, “Metacognition and Learning: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations,”
Metacognition and Learning 1 (April 2006): 3–14, 4.
8. Bruer, Schools for Thought, 72.
9. Robert Fisher, “Thinking about Thinking: Developing Metacognition in Children,”
Early Child Development and Care 141 (1998): 1–15.
10. Ann L. Brown, John D. Bransford, Roberta A. Ferrara, and Joseph C. Campione,
“Learning, Remembering and Understanding,” in Handbook of Child Psychology, ed.
Paul Henry Mussen, John H. Flavell, Leonard Carmichael, and Ellen M. Markman (New
York: John Wiley, 1983), 77–166.
11. Phillip Adey and Michael Shayer, Really Raising Standards: Cognitive Interven-
tion and Academic Achievement (London: Routledge, 1984).
12. Robert Kane, Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 117–18.
13. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald
W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1979), 15.
14. E.g., David W. Concepción, “Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge
and Metacognition,” Teaching Philosophy 27:4 (December 2004): 351–68; Michael
Cholbi, “Intentional Learning as a Model for Philosophical Pedagogy,” Teaching Philoso-
phy 30:1 (March 2007): 35–58; Shelagh Crooks “Teaching for Argumentative Thought,”
Teaching Philosophy 32:3 (September 2009): 247–61.
15. Kevin Possin, “A Field Guide to Critical-Thinking Assessment,” Teaching Phi-
losophy 31:3 (September 2008): 201–28, 203.
16. Concepción, “Reading Philosophy,” 355.
17. Crooks, “Teaching for Argumentative Thought,” 248.
18. Brian Ribeiro and Scott Aikin, “A Consistency Challenge for Moral and Religious
Beliefs,” Teaching Philosophy 32:2 (June 2009): 127–51.
168 PATRICK STOKES

19. Scott G. Paris and Peter Winograd, “How Metacognition can Promote Academic
Learning and Instruction,” in Dimensions of Thinking and Cognitive Instruction, ed. Beau
Fly Jones and Laura Idol (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980), 15–51, 18.
20. Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson, “Seven Principles for Good Prac-
tice in Undergraduate Education,” AAHE Bulletin 3-7 (1987), http://learningcommons
.evergreen.edu/pdf/fall1987.pdf, accessed 21 November 2010.
21. E.g., Bernadette Van Hout-Wolters, Robert Jan Simons, and Simone Volet, “Active
Learning: Self-Directed Learning and Independent Work,” in New Learning, ed. Robert
Jan Simons, Jos van der Linden, and Tom Duffy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 21–36; Mike
McManus and Gary Taylor, “Introduction,” in Active Learning and Active Citizenship:
Theoretical Contexts, ed. Mike McManus and Gary Taylor (Birmingham: University of
Birmingham, 2009), 8–29, 10.
22. Chickering and Gamson, “Seven Principles.”
23. Osmo Kivinen and Pekka Ristelä, “From Constructivism to a Pragmatist Concep-
tion of Learning,” Oxford Review of Education 29:3 (September 2003): 363–75.
24. Heather Fry, Stephen Ketteridge, and Stephanie Marshall, “Understanding Student
Learning,” in A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 3rd ed., ed.
Heather Fry, Stephen Ketteridge, and Stephanie Marshall (London: Routledge, 2008),
9–10.
25. John Biggs and Catherine Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd
ed. (Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press, 2007).
26. Brendan Larvor, “Feeling the Force of Argument,” in Andrea Kenkmann, Teaching
Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2009), 134–51.
27. Ribeiro and Aikin, “A Consistency Challenge,” 138.
28. Larvor, “Feeling the Force of Argument,” 137.
29. Ibid., 146–47.
30. Ribeiro and Aikin, “A Consistency Challenge,” 128; see also Anthony Ellis,
“Morality and Scripture,” Teaching Philosophy 19:3 (1996): 233–46.
31. For this reason, I tend to disagree slightly with Nadelhoffer and Nahmias’s assertion
(Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias, “Polling as Pedagogy: Experimental Philosophy
as a Valuable Tool for Teaching Philosophy,” Teaching Philosophy 31:1 [March 2008]:
39–58) that asking students to put their names on intuition surveys presents no special
problems, given that we routinely ask students to defend their views anyway (p. 56). When
talking about what we might call raw (i.e., spontaneous and uninterrogated) intuitions,
particularly as these pertain to sensitive moral issues, students may be more emotionally
and practically invested in their responses than when asked to present considered and
carefully reasoned arguments. Moral gut reactions have a certain intimacy that calls for
careful handling.
32. Simon Bates, “Case Study 1: The Use of Electronic Voting Systems in Large Group
Lectures,” in Fry, Ketteridge, and Marshall, A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in
Higher Education, 230–31.
33. John Immerwahr, “Engaging the ‘Thumb Generation’ with Clickers,” Teaching
Philosophy 32:3 (September 2009): 233–45.
34. Nadelhoffer and Nahmias, “Polling as Pedagogy,” 45–46.
35. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” The
Monist 59:2 (1976): 204–17.
 PHILOSOPHY HAS CONSEQUENCES! 169

36. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs
1:1 (Fall 1971): 47–66.
37. Adapted from Victor Grassian, Moral Reasoning: Ethical Theory and Some
Contemporary Moral Problems (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992), 9.
38. A scenario based on the tragic events that followed the sinking of the William
Brown in 1841.
39. Derived from Kane, Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom.
40. Ribeiro and Aikin, “A Consistency Challenge,” 139. Ribeiro and Aikin also identify
three subspecies of denial response; as these are specific to conflicts between religious
and moral beliefs, they need not concern us here.

Patrick Stokes, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, D5.18
Melbourne Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood VIC 3125, Australia; Patrick
.Stokes@deakin.edu.au